Donna Leon - Drawing Conclusions

Brunetti could not endure it. He got to his feet and walked over to the church, stood in front of the stone announcing that it was the baptismal church of Vivaldi. Minutes passed. He thought he could still hear the sobs, but could not bring himself to turn and look.

After reading the inscription again, Brunetti went back to the bench and resumed his seat.

Morandi reached out suddenly and grabbed Brunetti’s wrist. ‘I hit her.’ His face was blotched and red, and two strands of hair had fallen down on either side of his nose. He hiccuped with residual grief, then said it again, as if confession would purge him, ‘I hit her. I never did that, not in all the years we were together.’ Brunetti looked away but heard the old man say, ‘And then she told me she’d given her the key.’

He pulled at Brunetti’s wrist until he was turned round and facing him. ‘You have to understand. I had to have the key. They won’t let you into the box unless you have it, and I had to pay for the casa di cura . Or else she’d go to the public place. But I couldn’t tell her that because then I’d have to tell her everything.’ His grip intensified to add significance to what he had to say. He started to speak, coughed, and then said in a whisper, ‘And then she wouldn’t respect me any more.’

Brunetti’s mind flashed to Signora Orsoni’s account of her brother-in-law’s justification for his every act of violence. And here he was listening to the same story. But what a gulf between them. Or was there? With his right hand he prised Morandi’s fingers, one by one, from his wrist. To enforce the action, he took the old man’s hand and placed it on Morandi’s thigh.

‘What happened when you went to see Signora Altavilla?’ Brunetti asked.

The old man seemed taken aback. ‘I told you. I asked her for the key.’ As if aware of his disarray, he ran his hands up over his face, pulling his hair free to hang across his collar.

‘Asked?’

Morandi showed no surprise at either the word or the tone in which Brunetti repeated it. ‘All right,’ he said reluctantly. ‘I told her to give me the key.’

‘Or else?’

This startled him. ‘There was no or else. She had the key and I wanted her to give it to me. If she didn’t want to, there wasn’t anything I could do about it.’

‘You could have threatened her,’ Brunetti suggested.

Morandi’s face showed bafflement as well as confusion, and Brunetti thought it was genuine. ‘But she’s a woman.’

Brunetti refrained from saying that Signora Sartori was a woman, too, and that had not prevented him from hitting her. Instead, voice calm, he asked again, ‘What happened?’

Morandi looked at the ground again, and Brunetti watched his head flush with embarrassment. ‘Did you hit her?’ asked Brunetti, stopping himself from adding, ‘too.’

Keeping his eyes on the ground, like a child attempting to escape a reprimand, Morandi shook his head a few times. Brunetti refused to allow himself to be manipulated by the other man’s silence and asked again, ‘Did you hit her?’

Morandi spoke so softly as to be almost inaudible. ‘Not really.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I grabbed her,’ he said, shot a look at Brunetti and went back to staring at the pavement. Again, Brunetti decided on silence. ‘She told me to leave, that there was nothing I could say that would make her give me the key. And then she moved towards the door.’

‘What was she going to do with the key?’ Brunetti asked.

Morandi raised a blank face to Brunetti. ‘I don’t know. She didn’t say.’ Brunetti’s imagination vied with his knowledge of the law. The only person who had the right to open the box was the keyholder, accompanied by a representative of the bank with the second key. For anyone else to use it, a court order was necessary, and to get that, evidence of a crime was necessary. But after so many years, there was no longer a crime.

Morandi could have told the bank he had lost it. It would have taken time, but eventually he would have been given access to the box and its contents. Possession of the key was meaningless: it conveyed no power and no authority to the person who had it; only the authorized person could open the box. Signora Altavilla did not know this, and apparently neither did Morandi. Empty threats. Empty menaces.

Relentless, Brunetti asked, ‘What happened?’

It took a long time, and Morandi had no obligation to answer, but he didn’t know that, either, and so he said, ‘She walked over to the door, and I tried to stop her.’ As he spoke, Morandi raised his hands in front of him and cupped his fingers. ‘I said her name, and when she turned around, I put my hands on her shoulders, but when I saw her face, I remembered my promise.’ He looked at Brunetti. ‘I started to move my hands away, but she pulled herself free and went to the door and opened it.’

‘And you?’

Voice even smaller, softer, Morandi said, ‘I felt so ashamed of myself. First I hit Maria, and then I put my hands on this other woman. I didn’t even know her, and there I was, holding her by the shoulders.’

‘That’s all you did?’ Brunetti insisted.

Morandi covered his eyes with one hand. ‘I was so ashamed I couldn’t even apologize. She opened the door for me and told me to get out, so there was nothing else I could do.’ He reached a hand towards Brunetti but then, remembering what had happened when he touched him before, he pulled it back. ‘May I tell you something?’

‘Yes.’

‘I started to cry on the staircase, on the way down. I hit Maria and then I frightened that poor woman. I had to stand inside the door until I stopped crying. That time, when I hit Maria, I made a promise that I’d never do a bad thing again, never in my life, but there I was, doing a bad thing again.

‘So I told myself that, if I loved Maria the way I said I did, I’d never do another thing like that again in my life.’ He stopped at the sound of his words, looked at Brunetti with an embarrassed grin and added, ‘Not that there’s much of that left.’ The smile faded and he went on. ‘And I told myself I’d never lie again and never do a single thing that Maria wouldn’t like.’

‘Why?’

‘I told you why. Because I was so ashamed of what I’d done.’

‘But what did you think would happen if you did what you promised?’ Brunetti asked.

Morandi put the tip of his right forefinger on the centre of his thigh and pushed it in a few times, each time waiting for the small impression to disappear before pushing it down again.

‘What would happen, Signor Morandi?’

Pushing, waiting, pushing, waiting, the right moment would come. Finally Morandi said, ‘Because maybe, if she knew, she’d love me.’

‘You mean go back to loving you?’ Brunetti asked.

Morandi’s astonishment was total: Brunetti read it in the wide blankness of his eyes as he turned to look at him. ‘No. Love me. She never has. Not really. But I came along when she was almost forty, and so she took me and lived with me. But she never loved me, not really.’ The tears were back, falling on to his shirt, but Morandi was unaware of them. ‘Not the way I love her.’

Again, he gave that doglike shake. ‘We’re the only people who know that,’ he said to Brunetti, placing his hand fleetingly on his arm, touching it and quickly off, as if afraid for his hand. ‘Maria doesn’t know it, or she doesn’t know that I know. But I do. And now you do.’

Brunetti didn’t know what to say in the face of these awful truths and their even more awful consequences. There was no answer to be had, neither from the façade of the church nor from the casa di cura .

Brunetti got to his feet. He reached a hand down for the old man to take and helped him to stand. ‘Why don’t you let me walk you home?’